Greetings, ladybros. You’re probably wondering why, after a languid trickle of several new posts a month you have now been suddenly inundated with shitloads of new articles. Well, the truth is: we’ve been getting our house in order. No, we’re not dying, but we are going for quite a long sleep. To put it another way: this blog is going on a summer hiatus.

We know. We’re sorry. But the truth is, it’s a lot of work. It’s a full time job, actually, and one that we’re not actually paid for. And that is part of the problem – the amount of time this blog needs is not time that either of the two of us can afford. The emails (of which we get, literally, hundreds) alone would take up an unmanageable portion of our respective weeks if we even attempted to answer every single one (we’re REALLY sorry if we never answered your email).

Since the two of us co-founded the Vagenda with a bunch of our university friends three years ago, it has become bigger than we could have ever imagined. Having gone viral within the first 24 hours, it’s garnered over 20 million hits (probably lots more by now, but we stopped counting at 20 million because analytics was another thing that was taking up loads of our time and we just don’t look at it anymore), been featured in every major national newspaper, appeared on radio and television, and made international headlines (most recently because of our Protein World and #distractinglysexy campaigns). It’s changed our lives more than we could ever have imagined.

When we started this blog, we were impoverished graduates who had been living in shitty Kentish Town garret with peeling wallpaper and windows that didn’t close. We shared a bathroom with the pub landlord. A slight upgrade to Rhiannon’s airing cupboard by Holly didn’t really improve matters. Our prospects were pretty shit and the writing careers we had always dreamed seemed entirely closed off to us.

Since the Vagenda took off in the way it did, we have been lucky enough to be given opportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have had. We’ve written columns for newspapers and were given a book deal from Random House. Despite disapproving reviews by such figures as Germaine Greer, it’s sold well and has achieved what it set out to do, which was to make our readers furious about sexism in the media while also making them laugh (or “wet themselves on a sun lounger”, as one reader put it this week – apologies to the hotelkeepers).

But the Vagenda was never just about us. When we started the blog up until after we got the book deal we were both writing the majority of the Vagenda’s content for the website. But it wasn’t long before the enthusiastic emails started coming and we started featuring the work of other writers. Since then, the Vagenda has since transformed into a different thing entirely: a community. A community of furious, funny, dicked-off women who have found a place where they can rant, rage and reference vaginas to their heart’s content. We have been completely taken aback by the sheer talent that has been on display from those who have contributed to the website – we’ve covered everything from rape to domestic abuse, from racism to miscarriage, from the tampon tax to Taylor Swift, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks to our contributors, this website has told stories that the mainstream media so often isn’t interested in: women’s stories.

We probably haven’t said it enough – seriously, those emails – but we are enormously proud of everyone who has contributed to the Vagenda. Some of you, since being published here, have gone on to have book deals or careers in writing. Each time this happens we want to punch the air because each time one of you makes it into the stale, grey world of media, you make it funnier, more passionate, more interesting, and a hell of a lot ruder. Though since the launch of the Vagenda we have seen the world of media change and the fight for equality take off in incredible ways (who could have imagined that Beyoncé moment, back in 2012? Or Malala? Or the sheer momentum of the vocal fight against rape victim blaming?) it should be blatantly clear to anyone with tits – and without – that the media still needs feminism more than ever.

Since 2012, women’s magazines, always the biggest source of our ire, have come on leaps and bounds (though many of them are still shit). We’ve seen new, female-focused digital efforts launched (though many of them are, likewise, shit). This shows that media owners are now taking female audiences more seriously – and not just because they think they can flog us handbags – but because the women of the internet have shown that there is room for unapologetic, sweary, intelligent funny writing for female audiences.

The question is, where do we go from here? The Vagenda has achieved a lot, and could still have more to achieve, but the question is, how? This website is not monetised. We have never accepted offers of advertising because we felt it would compromise our message. We did a Kickstarter and raised £2000, which helped (THANK YOU!!), but ultimately, like so much feminist labour, you’re in it for love, not for money. We never wanted to be one of those viral news aggregators spewing out recycled content for advertising clicks (and even if we did, we wouldn’t have the resources – there are two of us). We may have defended Beyoncé’s feminism, but we’ve never really been in it for the clickbait market. The internet’s thirst for opinion seems endless, but as time has gone on we’ve become less interested in the concept of the “news hook” because it’s never really been what our readers wanted.

As Amanda Hess so eloquently put it in her article about why she stopped “Ladyblogging”:

“The ladyblogger beat is propelled by opinions and opinions on opinions. That makes a ladyblog an interesting place for a writer to hone her rhetorical tools. But once they get sharp enough, she may begin to fantasize about impaling herself with them. Modern sexism often manifests itself in the form of innumerable little slights. Documenting them all is a monotonous task, and parrying each with an original insight or a cutting retort is an impossible one. On my best days, the dynamic challenged me to find inventive ways to illuminate old problems. On my worst, I felt like I was playing a game of feminist Mad Libs: The sexist quote and offending speaker may change, but the patriarchy remains the same. At some point, the pieces start threatening to write themselves.”

We hope that we have managed to avoid this fate. We’ve always sought to publish well-written, funny articles about the real world inequalities facing women every day, and to give a platform to your stories. We have, we hope, achieved that without becoming some kind of tedious, algorithmed feminist opinion regurgitator.

Still, as the blog has grown in popularity, our roles have changed. We have gone from being mostly writers for it to being editors for it, and when you’re trying to juggle that with making rent, things become quite tough. Journalism is not in a great state at the moment, and though we’re thankful when we are paid for our writing, neither of us are really sure what our next moves are.

And we are tired. We are ever so, ever so tired, and in order to prevent the burnout that afflicts so many feminist writers and to quote our mothers: we need a lie down.

The landscape of the internet, and indeed the world, is different to what it was when we started in 2012. Which is why, while we are sleeping, we need your help. We need you to tell us where the Vagenda should be headed. Do we stay the same, adapt, or die? If you have any ideas at all, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll be back at some point to have a chat about it, promise.

Until then, so long, and thanks for all the fish(bowls). We couldn’t ask for better readers.

Rhiannon and Holly xx

During what was an absolutely stonking weekend at Glastonbury, I was unlucky enough to witness the ‘Kim Kardashian sex tape flag’ a few times around the festival. It was sad to see such an actively negative message in that field of irrepressible glee, glorious hangovers and mind-moulding music that is Glastonbury. Naively, I was under the opinion that it would be detested within the festival, and unheard-of outside it.

Naivety is not something I wish to fall victim to… but I did. The famed Kardashian-Ray J Flag Flyer ended up shocking me – but not because of the explicit imagery it was touting. Much to Flag-Flyer’s surprise, I was far more shocked by the reaction than the original intent.

Firstly, it is vital to say that ideas on how the Kardashian franchise helps or discredits our movements and trials for total gender equality is, in this instance, irrelevant to the argument against the heinous flag. On top of that, personal opinions on Kim Kardashian or Kanye West are again null and void in discussing this serious issue – why? Because equality is not about personality or names or faces, or jobs or performances; equality is not justice. It is a movement where acts like these should be ridiculed not celebrated, detested not praised, and fought against not accepted.

If we, for a second, look past the completely backwards and disturbing message itself and look instead at the response, we should be disturbed. Men and women with self-proclaimed liberated minds were not only condoning this act, but celebrating it. Men and women were arguing that Kim Kardashian is ‘fair game’ for publicising her body previously; men and women were even calling ‘respect’ and ‘kudos’ to said Flag-Flyer. In all likelihood this was a malicious, attention-seeking wind-up to get a rise out of Yeezy, but this has gone beyond the infamous flag creator’s five minutes of fame. It has gone beyond the literary genius of: ‘Get down, girl, get head, get down’ (for those unaware of Kanye’s lyrics, they have cleverly swapped ‘go head’ to ‘get head’ to link to the image). Now it is about the reaction to it. The viral shame-sensation, now rife with laddish bantz online and an onslaught of anti-feminist, woman-shaming madness, is what we need to address. Apparently, the biggest way to insult Kanye is to visually call out ‘his woman’ as a slut.

Lily Allen, quite rightly, argued against ‘haters’ that watch someone perform purely to ‘let them have it’ through the timeless institution of Instagram. She wrote, ‘Don’t go to someone’s house and complain about their food’ with a complementary video of her burning a ‘F*CK KANYE’ flag so it just says ‘KANYE’. The video is at worst a pyromaniac’s dream and at best a creative and valid point. The Flag Flyer however, takes it one step further: going to someone’s house and complaining about their wife’s shoes. It seems that men, in character, are safe from ridicule but their wives/girlfriends/partners are not. Here I was thinking gone were the days when the way to disrespect a man was to ‘make a cuckold’ out of him. Chaucer would be thrilled that he remains so contemporary.

I’m not sure we will see a day, nor do I want to, when Beyoncé is performing and an anti-fan (for want of better word for someone who dislikes an artist but still makes the effort to go and watch them) waves a blown up picture of Jay Z sexing it up with some girl from a decade ago as an act of discrediting her. Her. But of course we wouldn’t – Jay Z’s past sex life is not the property of Beyonce, nor is his current one. The media, however, donates Beyonce’s past, present and future sex life to Jay Z. Want to shame a woman? Find a naked/sexual picture of her. Want to shame a man? Find a naked/sexual picture of his girlfriend or wife. We are still in a situation where Ray J will get respect for his part to play but not Kim. This is not a new issue but it is one that we think we are winning – we are clearly not. Christina Aguilera’s song said 13 years ago, ‘The guy can get away with it and the girl gets named’, and here we are again. So apparently you can ‘hold us down’… You just need a flag. And no, it doesn’t matter that the subject in this case is a Kardashian. We cannot pick and choose who to defend – that is not equality, and the thought of compromising it is far scarier than some explicit image of a sexual act carried out 45 times a day* (*this is not an accurate or researched statistic).

Why, indeed, is the act itself even seen as degrading? Headlines read ‘Kim Kardashian shamed by sex tape flag’ – but why is she shamed? Because they have shamed her; no other reason. She behaved like a whore, and he is damaged by association. That’s what we’re buying into.

We will continue to live in an age of indecency and amorality to women unless we change not only our actions but our responses. This malicious, spiteful flag dimmed my Glastonbury sparkle for a moment, but I refuse to stagnate in depression. So if you are in search of a credible laugh, then maybe check out the Lionel Richie Where’s Wally flag: much more genuinely entertaining, far less guaranteed to make your blood boil. Doesn’t tickle you? Find something else! Let’s give something interesting and humorous the attention it deserves instead of allowing others to fill our virtual and social lives with hate, shame and misogyny. And let’s remember that the infamous Flag Flyer at Glastonbury only gains power when our voices back him up.

-FC

In December last year, my boyfriend and I adopted a cat together. It was apparently the cue the world had been waiting for, because immediately the, ‘Oooh, is it a practice baby?’ comments started pouring in. No one was safe: not my family, not my friends, not my colleagues. Even one of my old teachers cracked the ‘First a cat, then a baby’ joke.

My boyfriend, it goes without saying, has been on the receiving end of precisely none of these remarks.

I’ll be the first to admit that having your love of cats equated with broodiness is not the world’s most pressing feminist concern. For one thing, it’s just patently ridiculous. My cat is nothing like a baby: she’s 10 years old, has retractable claws, and eats a special prescription diet food for obese cats called ‘Satiety’ that we buy in bulk from the vets’. I’m 99% sure those traits wouldn’t be normal in a child.

But the annoying thing isn’t that people think my cat’s a practice child, but that they think it’s my practice child – as in very demonstrably and individually mine, and not at all my boyfriend’s. Why am I assumed to be the one that’s hankering after a mini-me? Probably because it’s been drilled into us since birth that all women want to have children, and that this urge is more powerful and universal than it is in men (even though research indicates that childless men and women show similar levels of desire for parenthood).

Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the ‘crazy cat lady’ stereotype. The crazy cat lady of old was an ugly, ageing spinster left on the shelf with only her furry friends for company; nowadays, she’s a career woman with no time for childbearing, but plenty of time to tweet photos of her favourite feline. Either way, she’s childless. The cats, it’s implied, are there to fill the gaping hole in her life where babies should be, functioning as either practice or replacement children depending on the woman’s age.

Of course there’s no equivalent phrase for men. What would that even be anyway? ‘Deranged dog dudes’? ‘Mad mole men’? I’ll take suggestions via Twitter.

The idea underlying all of this – that children are essentially a woman’s domain – is an injustice to both genders, from the women who remain childless by choice or suffer the stigma of never becoming a mother, to the men who yearn for fatherhood or want to play a greater role in their children’s upbringing. It’s attitudes like this that prevent men from playing a greater role in childcare or entering the early years education sector.

We can’t just cross our fingers and hope that the next generation will somehow magically overcomes years of internalised gender socialisation on its own. We need to change our behaviour. And that starts with not automatically assuming that all women with cats are simply trying to silence the lonely ache of an empty uterus.

To misquote Freud: “Sometimes a cat is just a cat.”

-Leah Eades

Love him or hate him, you will have spent some of your life studying the bard with the pointy beard. I myself have always been a fan, ever since the days I pretended to be Lady Macbeth in Year 9, posing dramatically and standing with my feet wide apart (and giggling when I had to say the ‘unsex me here’ bit). In fact, I went on to become an English teacher, meaning I have no doubt bored to tears hundreds of poor children, enthusing about the brilliant insight he has into the human psyche, his beautiful and eloquent language, or if all else fails, pointing out that ‘love stick’ and ‘my naked weapon is out’ in Romeo and Juliet is, well, you know, about penises. Which is sometimes all you can do on a Friday afternoon with a bottom set. The thing is though, I’m right. I think the reason I first adored him was the character of Lady Macbeth. She was brilliant. Bossing her husband about, driven by a desire for power and greatness, then driven mad by her conscience at what she’d done. In fact, during the scene where the king is killed, Macbeth mucks it up by bringing the daggers back out, so she has to go in and cover them in blood to make it look like they did it. She tells her husband off for being such a wuss. Amazing character. And there are others. Cordelia in King Lear refuses to bow to the sycophantic ramblings of her sisters in order to ‘prove’ how much she loves her Dad. When he banishes her, she gets a French army to come and rescue him. And she isn’t just ‘good,’ she’s stubborn, wilful and proud. In short, in a time when women were not even allowed on the stage, to vote, or own property, they were written as complex, nuanced and independent characters, encompassing all of the scope and breadth of their male counterparts.

Fast forward a few centuries. Brilliant, you say, now we had such great beginnings (considering the time and women’s place in society), we must pretty much be on a par with men in terms of the characterisation of women. Right? Sadly, no. Perhaps in tune with back-pedalling in other areas of life (high street strip bars, porn in music videos, anti-abortion laws) representation of women in literature is sadly flat, limited, or just not reaching a wide audience.

To cite a few popular examples (and popular makes sense, because the plebs were watching Shakespeare), Gone Girl promised so much, really explored the differences in gender and expectations in terms of relationships, and then ruined it (spoiler alert) by turning the female character into just another bunny boiler mentalist that actually had you feeling a bit sorry for the creep that cheated on her. Twilight and, by extrapolation, Fifty Shades, was an abhorrence in terms of female characters. Whiny women with no ambition beyond getting married to some psychotic narcissist that abused them. Nice. Of course there are hundreds of less popular books with amazing female characters but the fact is that they are in a huge minority. Yes, Katniss Everdeen, but I don’t like that she had to subscribe to the idea that she had to be ‘manly’ and not have feelings in order to be a hero. Lots of male heroes get upset about stuff and that doesn’t seem to impinge on their heroicness (heroicity?). My niece said she wanted to be a boy, because they got to do far more interesting stuff, and I don’t blame her. Everywhere we look, male characters are off having wonderful adventures while women, well, aren’t. On the opposite side, where are the books about men falling in love and having babies? It’s not like we’re doing it independently. But someone decided this was the stuff of ‘women’s fiction’ (even Juliet had more on her plate than just a boy she fancied) and therefore doesn’t cross over.

On both sides, there will always be ‘fluff.’ The literary equivalent of chick flicks and action films, that you can pleasantly switch your brain off to while the main character kills people/solves mysteries/gets the girl or finds her dream job/goes on a diet/gets the boy. While I don’t read them myself, I understand their role, but these things don’t exist in a vacuum. These models of simple storytelling balloon out into the wider literary world and create unhelpful assumptions about gender and the actions and events associated with it. And even then, they’re often covering far more challenging and complex problems than finding a guy, but the cover and the marketing so often sell it that way.

Of course the ultimate irony here is that it’s women that are reading all the books. Almost 50% of women class themselves as ‘avid readers,’ with only 26% joining this list from the other side of the chromosome. You would think that women would control the industry they have such an enormous influence on, not be continually limited by it. But then again, that hasn’t worked in Hollywood film, either (12% of on-screen protagonists in US films in the 2014 were female).

And what about the big literary prizes? Seeing as women dominate the reading world so much, you would think it would extend to other areas. Again, this is not reflected. The list of prizes, from Costa to Booker, are dominated by male writers, with up to 80% of the longlists comprised of male writers. And interestingly enough, a lot of the female writers that are listed are writing about men. For some reason, they are still given far much more narrative nuance and scope than those of us with a uterus.

So what’s the solution? Personally, I think some of the fault can be laid at the doors of the publishing industry. If they insist on branding books ‘for women’ or by women in such a cutesy fluffy way, even when the content is serious, then it will be impossible for female authors, or for writers with female characters, to move outside the sphere of commercial fiction and into the more serious and critically-acclaimed areas that are currently dominated by males.  The argument from publishers is that they only print stuff that will sell. So the question is, are there actually fantastic books out there that aren’t being printed because they aren’t considered popular, or are they being written at all? It’s tricky to decide whether the fault lies with the writer, or the publisher. If J.K. Rowling had pitched ‘Harriette Potter,’ would the publishing world be as keen to give her a voice? From children’s books through to adult fiction, we are severely lacking interesting, engaging, nuanced characters that would inspire young people (not just girls) to move outside the roles prescribed to them by society and allow that gender does not have to define your personality or your actions.

Will would be disappointed.

 - Sarah Tinsley

On every high street in the UK at the moment a sea of knobbly knees peeking out from ripped jeans will greet you as you pass by. Some of you might wrongly think that Primark’s quality control has gone down the pan, and this is one serious factory fault. But no: these rips are perfectly symmetrical, with equal diameters across each knee – this friend, is the pre-ripped jean. And they’re big this season.

According to Topshop’s website, each £42 pair of jeans ‘are toughened up with rips and tears to add some ‘edge’. A well educated guess is that the ‘edge’ Topshop is referring to is a nod toward the youth subcultures of punk, heavy metal and grunge, who all adopted distressed denim as a visual symbol of social dissent. For punks, wearing jeans until they ripped in was a symbol of the fact that they refused to participate in capitalism; wearing jeans until they literally fell off your legs reduced the number of jeans purchased and was a big economic middle finger to shops and advertisers.

However, buying a pair of pre-ripped jeans is about as punk as the new Virgin credit cards decorated with the Never Mind the Bollocks album cover. You didn’t rip those jeans climbing into empty buildings and sitting on curbs drinking Newcastle Brown. No, you bought them from the high street and those rips were put their by a migrant worker in Mauritius who got paid 22p per hour. There is seriously nothing less edgy in the whole wide world.

Ripped jeans have long been a fashion perennial, but why the sudden resurgence? If distressed and worn clothing is a cultural symbol for the rejection of capitalism, is high street fashion feigning resistance? Austerity chic is a bit rich coming from Phillip Green’s Tory supporting, tax avoiding empire. Rather than an act of resistance, pre-ripped jeans represent the ultimate paradox in capitalist production and consumption. Topshop employs Sri Lankan, Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Mauritius where they work for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week for 22p – 40p per hour. Neil Kearney, of the International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation, said: “because of the economic conditions of a country like Mauritius, companies are unable to attract local labour. Instead they recruit migrant workers, who pay a significant fee for the job. Many migrant workers who go to work in these garment factories are like slaves.” That’s right – someone is paid 22p for their hard labour to make your £42 jeans look like you give a crap about that sort of thing.

We live in an imperfect world and all of our clothing is made in unequal and wretched conditions due to global capitalism, but there are things you can do to minimise this participation – and one of those is to buy a pair of jeans that will last and wear them down until they actually rip, which might I add, is always at the crotch first.

-  Kirsty Major

Bio: Suzanne Brown is a 22-year-old artist living in Philadelphia; she is currently working towards her BFA at Tyler School of Art. Formerly a Chinese Intelligence student, Brown’s work is heavily influenced by international sociopolitical issues, addressing topics such as poverty, rape culture, sexism, and abuse. Her work has participated in a number of group exhibitions in galleries such as Vox Populi, the Louvres, SCOPE Miami, and Stella Elkins.

About the project: I made this series in hopes of presenting “rape validations” in a new way.  By putting these phrases next to a different subject, viewers will – I hope – take an extra second to really consider the effects of victim blaming.

]]> http://vagendamagazine.com/2015/07/were-my-pyjamas-too-short/feed/ 4 http://vagendamagazine.com/2015/07/i-know-its-not-socially-acceptable-but-im-really-really-not-enjoying-being-pregnant/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=i-know-its-not-socially-acceptable-but-im-really-really-not-enjoying-being-pregnant http://vagendamagazine.com/2015/07/i-know-its-not-socially-acceptable-but-im-really-really-not-enjoying-being-pregnant/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2015 16:04:50 +0000 http://vagendamagazine.com/?p=6213

…and all the pregnancy propaganda around is making it worse

Last November I found out I was pregnant. I have been married for 5 years and I am nearly 32. My husband and I had talked about babies and both said how important it was to us but neither of us felt an urgent rush. We were enjoying “being adults” and, for the first time in our lives, having a bit of disposable income. There were whimsical nights of unprotected loved-up madness that we obviously knew could lead to a baby and, I suppose, in my mind was the idea: well, we’re both employed, we own a house – it wouldn’t be a disaster…. I certainly would prefer to have a happy accident than become obsessed with when I was ovulating’. And yet, bizarrely, on same the day that my beloved grandmother finally died after an awful, prolonged battle with cancer, I realised that my painfully engorged breasts were actually telling me something important.

I didn’t think ‘hooray’ and I didn’t think ‘Yessss!’ and punch the air. My first thought was ‘Fuck.’ My second was, ‘if I had an abortion would I be able to keep it a secret?’ My husband’s reaction was impassive as he watched me panic. Neither of us had thought it would actually happen.

I booked an appointment with a doctor to talk through options and, in the meantime, thought about options. My husband very much took the stance: ‘it’s your decision, I’ll support you either way.’ Supportive but useless. I wanted him to say: ‘please keep the baby it means everything to me’ OR ‘ please don’t keep the baby, we’re not ready.’ But he didn’t. My hormones starting charging and my imagination went mad. I imagined the baby’s life. I felt guilty about its existence. I envisaged a little version of my husband running around and it was a nice thought. I rationalised that if I ended this baby’s life and then couldn’t fall pregnant again I would be inconsolable so we might as well just get on with it.

The support and care from all the midwives has been amazing. Our families and friends are ridiculously excited. There have been incredible moments for us, like when we had the first scan and realised our baby really existed. The look on my husband’s face when he first felt it kick is something I will remember forever. He has been amazing. He reads the baby a story every night, he sings it songs on the guitar. We have made a beautiful nursery for our baby, full of tiny clothes and apparatus to ensure that every one of its physical needs are met. It should all be happy days.

However, on the whole – and maybe it’s because I am not one of those women who have dreamed of being a mother all her life – I have found pregnancy physically and emotionally somewhere between very hard and totally traumatic. I can’t do all the things that I love anymore, like surfing and running. I have been extremely anaemic from the start and therefore, whilst I have luckily avoided all sickness and cravings, I have been utterly exhausted and needy. My skin, which has always been a victim of psoriasis, has hit an all time low. My breasts and bump are covered in bright red, angry flaky scales. The extra weight I have gained (that I just don’t like) is putting huge pressure on my thigh arteries causing very sharp pains and a lot of cramping in my calves and lower back, especially at night-time. I resent having to pee three times a night and I hate the fact that I can’t walk up a hill without nearly fainting.  I feel like people all around me, lots of whom I have never spoken to before, feel the need to tell me how well I look (I don’t), how “tidy” my bump is, how wonderful it is to be pregnant, how excited I must be and how good it is that I am managing to drag myself into work despite feeling rough most of the time. When I tell them how I actually am they look on sympathetically and say ‘it will all be worth it in the end.’

I am bombarded by social messages of how good, right and enjoyable it is to be pregnant: ‘blooming’ ‘radiant’ ‘natural’ ‘happy’. Everywhere there are pictures of celebrity Mums who have a lot more time to rest and be pampered than us “real life” Mums-to-be who are madly working for as long as we can to save up for an inevitable penniless life that awaits post birth. Unlike the social messages I get, all I feel is ‘vulnerable,’ ‘needy’ and ‘terrified.’ I am not OK with how my body has changed and I am resentful that I don’t feel well and energetic like I used to. I hate people telling me how worth it it will be in the end because I don’t always believe them. How can they know this?

In a few weeks’ time my already badly transformed, disfigured and battered body, will be either sliced or ripped open during hours of excruciating pain. Rather than have any time to physically and mentally recover from this traumatic ordeal I will be expected to chain myself to the baby by my breasts feeding it on demand every two hours like a bridled dairy cow. My vagina or/and abdomen will be transformed beyond recognition and I am supposed to be OK with that because my baby’s arrival makes 4 weeks of heavy bleeding and an inability to pee without wincing all worthwhile.

It terrifies me to think that, unlike all the messages I get from social media, I won’t just suddenly magically love my baby because I am supposed to. What if it’s not ‘all worth it in the end’?

It relieves me to be able to say this ‘out-loud’ and I am sure there must be other women who have found pregnancy less than enjoyable but on the main part, expressing opinions like these which demonstrate my failures as a natural super earth mother are just clearly not socially acceptable.

- Anon

Over the past two months I’ve been waitressing at a local bar and grill restaurant in the conservative, white middle-class town where I live. The restaurant is tucked away in a quaint little corner of the town centre, in a building that was once a greasy burger bar decked out with a couple of stools for customers to perch on while they ate their patties (so the town oldies like to tell me while I clear away their dishes). We still serve burgers, but we serve them on a warm ceramic plate with a watercress salad and a dainty little bucket of French fries. If you would like some ketchup and/or mayo, I will dutifully squirt some into individual mini white dishes for you.

I actually don’t mind waiting tables – anything to fund the succession of unpaid arts internships I’ve being doing over the past five months. The hours are long and the work is exhausting, but I’m okay with that. I mop the floors and scrub the toilets in the morning, but I’m also okay with that.

Over the past few weeks this contentment has become increasingly fragile. I’ve noticed in a few of my fellow male co-workers a level of sexism and misogyny that, for them, has become normalised. Making jokes like ‘whey, nice jugs’ as I carry the water jugs upstairs, or ‘hope you don’t get raped on the way home!’ is just part of the everyday banter that goes on between the floor and kitchen staff. There’s nothing original here: we’ve all been subjected to countless rape and breast-related jokes in our time. It wasn’t funny the first time, and it still isn’t funny.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday night (the worst for waiting tables, but the best for tips) I ended up having a horribly uncomfortable argument with my manager (I’ll call him M) about my emotions. Some customers had been rude to me so I’d complained to M about it, who gave me an incredulous smirk and refused to take me seriously. I fought the urge to tell him to go fuck himself and, instead, said I needed a 5 minute breather and walked outside – a healthy way to deal with a stressful situation, right? In hindsight, I probably could have ignored the rudeness and gotten on with the humdrum of order-serve-clear-order-serve-clear. But I was tired, slightly hungover, and not willing to put up with any crap.

When I returned M took me aside and told me, in what he thought was an honest, sincere and thoughtful manner, that I can’t go getting all emotional like that, I can’t go getting all ‘teary eyed’ in the workplace. My oh my. Out of all the times in my life (and there have been many) that I have been made to feel like the whiny, emotional woman that society so desperately wants to categorise me as, this was by far one of the worst. I was stunned and, more than anything, quite pissed off: men telling women how to handle their emotions will never go down well. When I told him not to talk to me about my emotions, that they are none of his business, he looked at me with total disbelief like I was overreacting (yet again), and told me he was just giving me ‘advice’ on how I should behave. Thanks for the advice, M, but no thanks.

I considered quitting right then and there. I can imagine the scene now: I throw my pen and waiter’s pad into the pond (yes, there is a pond) and whip off my apron in the most melodramatic way possible, shout ‘I quit!’ and storm off into the night. Oh how M would have loved to see me giving my top performance of a woman gone hysterical. However satisfying this may have been at the time, I’m very glad I didn’t do it. Instead, I hid in the bathroom and shed a few tears – tears of anger and shame – and returned to the floor with an artificial smile plastered on my face.

I’ve turned that night over in my mind now many, many times, trying to figure out how I came out of that confrontation feeling so small, so ashamed of my emotions, while M surfaced as the stable, stoic man, always in the right. I’ve come to realise that there have been many instances in my life when I have been ashamed of my tears, saving them for behind closed doors or, more likely, for the sympathetic and non-judgmental company of my mother and close female friends. I’m not saying that men are liberated from the shame of tears – they have also suffered from the shame of crying, where tears become signifiers of weakness, drops of emasculation. But despite the many things that tears may signify – grief, pain, fear and joy, to name a few – their weakness is deeply rooted in the feminine.

There is a gender dynamic at play here, one that I am in a constant battle to break away from. I work in an environment that, on the one hand, trivialises female emotion and, on the other, endorses male chauvinism and aggression. It is acceptable for my male co-workers to shout and hurl abuse at each other, to call each other ‘fucking idiots’ and ‘wankers’, because their aggression is a performance of their masculinity, a show of dominance, a cock fight. But a woman on the verge of tears? No, that is completely unacceptable. In fact, it’s worse than unacceptable, it’s shameful.

So I take a turn in the opposite direction. I reign in my ‘feminine’ emotions and instead confront these men, tell them I find their way of speaking about women abhorrently sexist and absolutely not okay. And they smirk and say, “oh here we go again, you’re another one of those feminists, aren’t you?” They’re just having a laugh, they tell me, and I’m spoiling all the fun.

So where is an acceptable place for me to stand on the spectrum of emotion, if at all?

M likes to call me ‘doll’, which I think this pretty much sums up his perception of me. To him, I’m just a dainty thing with a pretty face and breasts, with teary eyes that threaten to shatter my doll-like exterior.

After this degrading confrontation with M, I was approached by my female co-workers who gave me nothing but pure golden-hearted sympathy. They’ve had to put up with this bullshit male chauvinism for much longer than I have: we’ve all had it from M, they told me, don’t worry, we know how you feel. In times like this, there’s nothing better than a good bit of female solidarity to keep the fighting spirits high.

But I can’t help but ask: why has this happened to every woman I work with? Why have we all been denigrated because of our gender, cast into the role of the subordinate female?

I’m sure there are many men out there who are just like M, who don’t take women seriously and think feminism is a joke, to whom sexism and misogyny is merely a part of an everyday social habit. Some habits take a long time to break. Until they do, don’t put up with their crap. Don’t allow yourself to be pigeonholed because of your gender. And, most of all, never feel ashamed of your tears.

-Cassie Davies

“How could she hug him?”

That’s the question that kept running through my mind back in April as I watched Katie Couric interview Floyd Mayweather. Because Katie Couric is a journalist but she is also a woman. Floyd Mayweather is a famous boxer who was, at the time of the interview, preparing to fight Manny Pacquiao, one of the most anticipated match-ups in sport. But he is also a serial batterer of women. So I understood her interviewing him on a professional level but…how could she hug him? The arms that he put around her were the same arms he had when he was convicted of beating women in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2010 (not to mention the accusations that didn’t lead to convictions). They’re the arms he had when Josie Harris, his former partner and mother of three of his children, said she was convinced he’d kill her. The fists at the ends of those arms are the same ones that punched her repeatedly in the back of the head, a type of punch that he, a professional boxer, knows to be particularly dangerous.

So how could she hug him?

She could hug him for the same reason that, following Oscar Pistorius’ conviction for killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, journalists like Simon Jenkins in The Guardian felt comfortable saying they didn’t think he should be jailed because, well, hadn’t he suffered enough? And this isn’t an attitude confined to sport. She hugged him for the same reason that countless reporters have kissed up to two time Oscar winner Sean Penn, despite knowing, somewhere in the back of their minds, that he once, in 1987, tied his ex-wife Madonna to a chair and beat her for hours. By the way, that’s the same Madonna who was recently pilloried for kissing a man 28 years her junior while Sean Penn’s actual engagement to the more youthful Charlize Theron is celebrated.

How could she hug him? She could hug him because the media treats the successes of abusive men as more important than their crimes? And every time they do that, they make it harder for women in abusive relationships to come forward. I know that because I was one.

I spent the better (well, worse) part of two years with a violent man who abused me emotionally, physically and sexually. He was arrested one night when an unmarked police car happened to drive past as he was choking me against a wall. It was the only lucky break I got during those two years but I, like so many women do in my situation, declined to press charges. The police, to their credit, encouraged me to do so, both that night and in a follow up interview. But I was terrified. He was my whole world- abusers have a way of isolating you to the point that you believe that- and what would our friends think? They knew he was troubled. That he drank too much. They all thought he was brilliant in his field and deserved more success than he had. They’d think I should have done more to help him. That’d I’d provoked him. They’d hug him and they’d turn away from me.

I am extremely privileged in so many ways. I’m aware, for example, that my experience with the police was not universal. I was a young, university educated white cisgender woman being attacked in a middle class suburb of Sydney so I have every reason to believe that I got more sympathetic treatment than I otherwise would have. I also come from a loving, close family who, when I eventually told them what had happened, were completely supportive. And yet even with all that, I didn’t have the courage to press charges or even to leave him right away. Because society made it very clear to me that it didn’t have my back.

I have blocked my former partner on all forms of social media and yet, 5 years on, traces remain. He shows up in the profile pictures of mutual friends, people who know what he did but decided it was too…awkward (?) to sever ties. When I returned home for a visit last year, I was invited to events he was at and though I explained, in as rational terms as I could, that asking me to break bread with my abuser was an unreasonable request, his invitation stood so I just didn’t attend.

I’ve learnt to live with that. I’ve learned to live with people who call themselves feminist allies closing their eyes when a living, breathing woman is telling them their friend is an abuser. Because we do. We learn to live with these things or we go mad.

But I couldn’t live with Katie Couric hugging Floyd Mayweather. The media owes it to us, to the countless women like me and like Floyd Mayweather’s former partners, to not act like abusing women is no big deal. Mayweather reportedly said on in May that he would welcome a rematch, meaning this Mayweather mania could start all over again. He’s certainly been a near constant presence in the news cycle for the last few months. But watching an athlete play their sport is not more important than an abused woman. Seeing an actor deliver an excellent performance is not more important than an abused woman. No film director’s skills will ever be more important than an abused woman.

Every time a public figure hugs one of these men, they are putting the arms of every violent man around them. They are putting the arms of my abuser around them. And they are reinforcing the idea that if women leave, they’ll be on their own. We deserve better than that.

- Brydie Lee-Kennedy

(via Feminist Disney)

So recently, for the first time, I experienced something remotely akin to Twitter “notoriety”.  Not really a great deal, mind, and not amongst the kind of people I might have liked – if I had wanted any in the first place.  It all started when I was innocently putting together a presentation for work which talked about career progression in our department. I google image searched the word “assistant” and was  eye-rollingly unsurprised to see that 9 out of the top 10 stock images were of women.  I took a screen shot of the picture and tweeted it to @EverydaySexism and The Vagenda, because…feminism. Out of curiosity, I then google image searched “manager” and was vindicated when I saw the opposite search results, one woman amongst ten men.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that The Vagenda had retweeted me and was thinking some powerful happy sisterhood thoughts at the responses garnered, when I went to join a couple of friends for a drink at the pub below my flat.  Within about five minutes of my first glass of wine, my phone went bat shit crazy with notifications.  Naturally, with nothing better to do, the Twitter account @FeministFailures had found my tweet and retweeted it to their six thousand and something delightfully humorous followers.  I was inundated with such insightful and intelligent comments as:

Here’s just a small selection for you.  I did, maybe foolishly, engage with one of these delightful characters who felt that I “opened myself up to being challenged”.  My only issue with that retort was that not one of the people laughing, retweeting, favouriting and ridiculing me were actually challenging my views in a meaningful way. None of them sought intelligent debate, nobody put forward an alternative view, all they did was seek to humiliate and mock. Certainly if anybody did challenge me intelligently I missed it through the storm of bullshit I was fielding.

I, as a socialist, feminist, northern working class girl living in a south-eastern small market town, will happily engage in political debate with anybody who fancies a good old chin wag thrashing it out, whether we have similar perspectives or not.  In fact I quite enjoy it and respect the ability to engage in debate with those of opposing opinions without resorting to name calling and ridicule. But when a group of people do nothing but seek to humiliate a person for their views, I get the red mist.

My first observation of the retweet from @FeministFailures was that they just didn’t appear to understand what I was outlining when I pointed out the #everydaysexism from this image search result.  They retweeted with their own image, which did nothing but reiterate my point since it showed that googling “garbage collector” and “sewer worker” brought up only men in an image search, so you know, reinforcing gender roles. Naturally their ability to misinterpret and misunderstand anything that doesn’t actually spell out the problem is actually absolute proof of how silly we feminists are, taking offence at the patriarchy.

The second thing I observed about this account, after being told by a hundred or so of their wittiest and most intellectually sharp followers was that if I was in my right to complain about such humdrudgery, then I should allow others to challenge my view.  This is fine, and as reiterated above, I have no objection to being challenged and offered an alternative perspective. Except barely one of the @FeministFailure followers did that. They lolled, they RT’d with an #SMH, they overused the emoji, and they heckled. Nobody offered me a reasonable discourse as to why I was wrong. In which case that Twitter account is there to do nothing but bully, humiliate and ridicule a group of people (feminists) found to be threatening in their eyes.

This leads me to my third and final point, and that is that after several days of wincing at my Twitter notifications, and now that the RT’s have quietened down and laughter has moved on to another feminist who is “failing”, that I pity these people.  How insecure, ineffectual and small must they feel to be threatened by a group of people who seek to redress an inequality, which whether or not they care to admit it, affects them too? Whether that is done through pointing to seemingly insignificant signs of a society obsessed with the idea of conforming to gender expectations, or through louder protest in blogs, newspaper articles, politics and Twitter, or through art, music and film, surely clamouring for men and women to be treated as equals shouldn’t be viewed as a threat but as a liberating cacophony of united voices?

I recently finished reading the great socialist tome The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, written in 1911 by Robert Tressell and focusing on a group of labourers in a small Kentish town who refuse to accept the logic of their erstwhile socialist colleagues when they point to the injustices that the capitalist system has piled upon them.  They verbally and physically attack the very people who seek to redress the inequality of a society run by the wealthy and for the wealthy. The very same system which causes the poverty-stricken, hungry, cold and miserable existence of the working classes in the early 20^th Century who deride and mock socialist principles.  The labourers wait for opportunities to call their more liberated colleagues out on what they see as the absurd notion of socialism, only to find that the socialists can respond and when they do, those who have challenged the view are left wanting for a retort.

This reminds me of the very nature of being a feminist on Twitter today.  There are groups of people out there just waiting for the opportunity to shout you down, humiliate and ridicule, and tear apart your argument by laughing and ridiculing at best, by abusing and threatening at worst. Like Frank Owen in The Philanthropists, don’t let them kill your spirit. What they don’t yet realise is that one day, they will benefit from the actions of the very movement that they dismiss.

Maybe one day, my quiet campaign and seemingly insignificant Tweets will change somebody’s mind, on the other hand, maybe not. But I am willing to give it a go and feel absolutely no regret at sending out the Tweets that caused my mini-Twitter storm in a teacup.

-LP